NSA contractor and former CIA technical employee Edward Snowden announced on 9 June that he was the source for documents published about the NSA’s secret surveillance programmes

Image courtesy of the Guardian

It's the kind of justification that only a government agency
could make.

After NSA insider Edward Snowden absconded with thousands of
sensitive US government documents from unsecured NSA servers
earlier this year and gave them to
the Guardian newspaper, a UK spy agency forced the paper
to destroy hard drives containing copies of the documents because
the agency said the newspaper's servers were not secure.

Although the Guardian insisted that the documents were
not stored on its network and were secure, an intelligence agency
expert argued that they were still vulnerable.

To illustrate how the information was still at risk, he told
editors that foreign agents could train a laser on "a plastic cup
in the room where the work was being carried out […] to pick up the
vibrations of what was being said" there. Vibrations on windows
could similarly be monitored remotely by laser.

The bizarre explanation comes a day after
the Guardian revealed that the GCHQ had forced the
newspaper to destroy the documents or face legal action and a
police raid.

The incident occurred on 20 July in a deserted basement of the
newspaper's offices. A senior editor and a Guardian computer
expert used angle grinders and drills to "pulverise the hard drives
and memory chips on which the encrypted files had been stored," the
newspaper revealed on 20 August. They destroyed the hard drives
under the watchful eye of GCHQ technicians who pointed out the
critical points on circuit boards that should be targeted with the
tools, and also took notes and photographs of the destruction, but
left the hard drive detritus behind.

The government insisted the paper destroy the hard drives, even
though they didn't contain the only copy of the documents.
Reporters and editors for the paper, who are based outside of the
UK, possess copies of the documents, as do journalists working for
the Washington Post and documentary filmmaker Laura
Poitras, who helped Snowden connect with the two news outlets to
leak the documents to them. Regardless, GCHQ officials insisted
that the Guardian destroy the hard drives or surrender
them.

On 18 August, the UK government also detained David Miranda for
nine hours at Heathrow Airport under a law aimed at terrorists,
some say in order to intimidate Miranda's
partner, Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald, who has
published a series of stories about the spy activities of the US
and UK based on the documents provided by Snowden.

The government began pressuring the paper two weeks ago to halt
its publication of stories that came out of the documents. This
included stories about how the GCHQ engaged in wide-scale
collection of communications from undersea cables and regularly
exchanged collected data with the NSA, and about how British
intelligence agencies spied on allies in London attending
summits.

Government officials demanded that the paper hand over the
Snowden documents on the grounds that they were stolen. The paper
refused, arguing that there was a substantial public interest in
the government activities revealed by the documents. The officials
left unhappy but returned three weeks later following more stories
published by the paper, telling editors, "You've had your fun. Now
we want the stuff back."

Eventually threats of legal action and a raid grew. The paper's
lawyers feared that the government might take legal action to
freeze the paper's reporting on the documents -- either by
obtaining an injunction under a statute that covers unauthorised
possession of confidential material, or by initiating criminal
proceedings under the Official Secrets Act.

They viewed it as a Pyrrhic victory for the government to
concede to destroying copies of the documents while still being
able to retain other copies of them outside the country --
particularly in the US where Guardian reporters are
protected by the First Amendment -- and continue to publish stories
about them. They chose to destroy the documents rather than hand
them over to the government because they didn't want to reveal to
the government everything they possessed.

"Both sides were well aware that other copies existed outside
the UK and that the reporting on the reach of state surveillance in
the 21st century would continue,"
the Guardian writes.